The alluring adventuress [a "mistress" of Byron's] was a universe away from the Albanian women, who, Byron observed, and not altogether disapprovingly, "are treated like slaves, beaten & in short complete beasts of burden, they plough, dig, & sow, I found them carrying wood & actually repairing the highways." While the men occupied themselves solely with killing--making war and hunting--"the women are the labourers, which after all is no great hardship in so delightful a climate," he noted airily.
As CM has noted before, Byron's mother was both needy and a battle-axe, which may account in part for his fear of women and his habits as a compulsive seducer and heartbreaker. He had also been sexually abused by a female servant when in his late childhood, at around age 11 or so. I once believed that such outrages were usually perpetrated by masters on servants, but as I learned over time, things are seldom so simple. It was also a shock to me to discover just how rampant sexual abuse of students by their older fellows was in the great public schools of England. I knew that there was a great deal of homosexual play, but assumed it was consensual, more or less, in the absence of girls. I had not heard that it was so often violent, degrading, and abusive. In the same book, discussing Byron's time at Harrow, Eisler quotes a passage from a long restricted series of writings on this and similar matters by the Victorian writer, John Addington Symonds; Byron attended Harrow many years before Symonds, but Eisler thinks that his time there would have shown him much the same kind of behaviour among the boys:
Every boy of good looks had a female name and was recognised either as a public prostitute or as some bigger fellow's bitch. Bitch was the word in common usage to indicate a boy who yielded his person to another. The talk in the studies and dormitories was incredibly obscene. One could not avoid seeing acts of onanism, mutual masturbation and the sport of naked boys in bed together...One bitch by the name of Cookson...fell out of favour...After he had been rolled on the floor, indecently exposed and violated in front of spectators..[they] cuffed and kicked him at their mercy, shied shoes at him and drove him with curses whimpering into his den.
It's difficult to understand or accept that so many well-to-do and powerful fathers, who tended to send their sons to the same schools they had attended themselves, could have done so knowing full well of the conditions their children would have to endure there. Considering Byron's description of the highly militarized Albanian society he so enjoyed, above, where pederasty was common, I think that perhaps this kind of all-male socialization, even to the point of encouraging men to view each other as sexual comrades, while women were mere "breeders", was not only a way to toughen boys, as Orwell once suggested in an essay, but to create bonds between them that made feminine society seem dull, sexless, and generally unattractive, and ultimately making the young men into better soldiers, less content with civilian life.
19 comments:
I recently re-read C.S. Lewis's Surprised by Joy and although he describes equally rampant homosexuality at one of his schools he also notes, in a somewhat surprised way, that the relationships were often genuinely affectionate. I suppose that would vary from one place and time to another. I would think, from the many descriptions of the generally oppressive nature of the places, that the uglier tendencies would predominate.
At any rate I must say these accounts of the English school system make my blood run cold and tend to stifle my occasional bouts of Anglophilia.
It's also been suggested (and I can't remember where I read this--maybe it was Lewis, in fact) that the general level of abuse and humiliation, sexual and otherwise, at these schools played a significant role in undermining English patriotism. Imagine the alienation of the American high school nerd or geek quintupled by rape etc. as well as total inability to escape. I can say with no hesitation at all that I would have loathed to a pathological degree a society in which I had endured such treatment.
Perhaps--and just a speculation--the alienation would have tended to be true of the victims, and Orwell's manly solidarity of the masters.
At any rate I do wonder how anyone who had seen this mess up close would abandon his own child to it.
Undermining English patriotism? I don't know. Perhaps it did, but I get the impression that what got undermined more was English religion, because the C of E was a strong presence in many of the old public schools, I believe. Not that the teachers or pupils were very devout; just that they were hedged about with pious observation.
I suspect that many of the younger boys, if they were attractive, were "victims" at first, and went on to become "masters". But I don't know. Still, even when such relationships were not violent or degrading, or if they allowed for a transfer of sexual power, their existence still leaves open the question of why the Brits wanted to encourage or just wink an eye at sexual relationships between young males. As I said, it seems almost deliberate.
The term "bitch" is used in American prisons today, and has the same meaning as in the English boarding schools. Inmates who take advantage of the "bitches" do not consider themselves homosexual. Perhaps it was the same in the boarding schools?
"Heavy lifting" on the part of women must have been common in warlike societies, if for no other reason that that so many of the men must have been off fighting, or dead.
I don't doubt, Peter, that it was the same in the boarding schools as in the prisons - I mean, most of the boys probably did not consider themselves to be true "sodomites", as they would have called it in the 19th century. I still wonder, though, why the parents put up with it. Equally, I wonder why authorities allow this in prisons - though at least there the men are guilty of something. The boys probably weren't.
All literature about England since Middle Ages notes their consistently callous treatment of their children. People were getting rid of their children in any way they could - indenturing them to tradesmen, giving them away to be fostered, etc. Public schools fitted admirably into that tradition.
As to the reasons why it was tolerated - the anthropological literature about different initiation traditions, hazings etc is immense. Most of the Doric cities in Greece functioned in exactly that way, with Sparta being the most famous. That kind of society cared usually little for women. In England it wasn't that bad. (I would say that fagging was not necessarily so sexual as it would appear from your quote.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fagging
Despite that, the legal situation of women in England was the worst of all European countries.
The best recent example of similar system is the so called "Dedovshchina" amongst conscripts in the Russian army. All those systems function in the same way - you have to suffer yours in the beginning, and later you get to dish it out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dedovshchina
That kind of thing is quite usual in all hierarchical, "barrack" societies when the proper authorities don't want to put too much effort into keeping the discipline. When married officers or teachers go home, the soldiers or the pupils run things on their own.
It can be regarded as a corrupt form of the typical initiation (eg the military boot camp). The true initiation differs in that that it is run by the authority figures (non-coms, tribal elders etc) and so is more of the proper test and less of the arbitrary humiliation.
I wouldn't connect the English fagging to military ability - the English army was one of the weakest in Europe. It would fit better the powerful Navy, with its immortal tradition of "lash, sodomy, and the rum".
It shouldn't be also connected to the disappearance of patriotism. Since the fagging system lasted for a long time, and the disappearance of patriotism began only in the beginning of the XX century, there should be some other cause which started it.
And as to the question: why did the parents allow it I can provide a hint: The name of nearly sole organization in Russia which tries to oppose the mistreatment of soldiers is the Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers.
http://www.hrw.org/reports/2004/russia1004/6.htm
http://www.pipss.org/document243.html
Men are not generally prone to care too much for one another. "A bit of hazing will make a man out of him" and "I could stand it, why shouldn't he?" are typical attitudes.
In societies where women have less influence, the children, and particularly boys will be treaded worse. As the result they will think less of the women, who will have less influence. It is a beautiful cycle, which can explain both Sparta and Islamic world.
I see I made a mistake: in Sparta women had actually much greater influence compared to the rest of the Greece. The men were in barracks, and their mothers and wives had to govern their lands.
Wow. A great subject to explore, Clio.
I always thought that the British public school system was the explanation for the stiff upper lip and repression Brits are known for. Children as young as 5 or six are sent away to be subjugated to abuse, and learn to take it like a man (i.e., suffer in silence.)
As to why fathers permit their sons to endure the same experience, Alice Miller explains throughout her writings that Parents who cannot admit and grieve the tragedy of their own childhoods go on to impose it on their own kids. "It was good enough for me, and it's good enough for you!"
Or along the same lines, "My father belted me, and now I'm glad he did!" Complete denial of a truth that must not be acknowledged.
Clio, it is remarkable how much your excerpt reminds me of modern prisoner conditions. Have you read Stephen Donaldson's classic essay, "A million jockers, punks, and queens"?
http://www.justdetention.org/en/docs/doc_01_lecture.asp
Betweeen that essay, and also Donaldson's advice for guys who've already been raped, you should get a good idea why the authorities tacitly condone prison sex.
http://www.justdetention.org/en/ps_hookingup.asp
I tend to doubt that the men served as bottoms in those boarding schools, were the ones sending their own boys there. At least in Donaldson's experience, only a smallish minority of men end up as the bottoms. But everyone come out with a clearly different mindset: of the importance of being a Man (predator; sexual penetrator), and disdain for anything else. This attitude would probably translate into the idea that school would "shape up" the kid.
Since the fathers were themselves products of the public schools, if they refused to send their sons there because of the destructive effect those places had on their "inmates", then they would have to admit that they themselves had been destroyed. Insofar as they viewed themselves as good sound fellows, the fathers would have if anything been especially eager to send their sons there, and resistant to any attempts to change the system that had, after all, made them what they were.
A Brit comedy show had a sketch about a nightmare alternative universe UK where kids were sent away to camp for the summer: concentration camp. When one mother demurred about sending their son, the father blustered, "Concentration camp never did me any harm!"
Just so.
Ahem, England calling, can you read me? Planet earth to outer space, come in, come in!
1) Lewis didn't exactly say those schools undermined patriotism. That would have been nonsense - within a few years of his leaving his boarding school, the best of his generation of former public school boys willingly went to be slaughtered in France.
I can't remember his word for it, but what he said was that public school turned many of his contemporaries into high brow snobs who despised 'philistines' - middle brow, non-intellectual people.
2) Let's get some historical sense into this discussion! Byron will have gone to public schools in the early 19th century. At that time there seems to have been almost no discipline in the schools. Tom Brown's Schooldays is a novel of that era. With the masters largely an absent presence, the schools were largely 'run' by the elder boys, through bullying.
In the mid 19th century, with Arnold and a series of great headmasters tried to use the public schools as laboratories of classical culture. The masters took over most of the discipline. The good late Victorian schools gave boys a fantastic classical education, such as impossible to receive anywhere in the world today. Ronald Knox describes his time at Eton in the early years of this century - probably about contemporary with CS Lewis. There is still bullying, and the food is bad, but you can't have 300 boys together without bullying. Most of the homosexuality by that era is consensual - Lewis doesn't describe homosexual rape going on! My brother went to a public boarding school in the 1970s - the food was OK, and he never spoke of bullying. Allowing the elder boys to discipline the younger ones was abolished at Eton and other schools in the 1970s, and by then it was largely symbolic. I saw the present tense being used above, and it's nonsense to imagine hundreds of five year old boys being sent of to this education today. The youngest anyone could go to a prep school even in Lewis' day would have been seven or eight. I know peope who have been at Eton in the past decade or so, and it's a picnic.
3) The people who went to teach in the great English public schools between say 1850 and the 1970s were amongst the brightest graduates from Oxford and Cambridge. They got a better education than almost anyone could from today's Universities. I went to an English girls boarding school in the 1970s, and we were taught by women and a few men with first class degrees in their subjects from Oxford, Cambridge, and UCD. There were far more reasons for sending children to these schools than 'it never did me any harm.' When Knox went to Oxford from Eton in c. 1910, there was little the dons could teach him.
4) Lewis' father was not a practical man, by Lewis' account, and didn't select very good schools. Much depends on the school at the time, and the headmaster.
5) Upper Middle Class parents who could not afford a private tutor didn't have a lot of options. Where are you imagining they could have sent their children to school?
*Not* sending your child to public school would have deprived them of the ability to enter University or Sandhurst, or most walks of professional life.
Most parents today know that Tom Wolfe's account of Ivy league colleges, in 'Charlotte Simmonds' is roughly accurate. But they can't not send their kid to university.
6) I'm not going to break out into Land of Hope and Glory, though we are approaching last night of the proms. But in fact, this education *did* 'make a man' of many boys. In the early 1980s, I knw a 93 year old lady whose husband had gone through Eton and Balliol before WWI, and went out to govern some province of the Empire. After a bit, he complained the biscuits were a bit stale, and it turned out 'they'd been there since before Kartoum.'
Sister Wolf,
Men tend to be like this. In any social group of men, control, aggression, dominance are usually present in one form or another. Usually it is simply casual, laid back fun. In more serious power situations though the game becomes more brutal.
Yet it does produce the kind of men who win over women. How many women are really attracted to wimpy men?
And as far as men suffering in silence, that is our lot really. Not too many women are really all that sympathetic to male emotions. I have never met a woman who really enjoys seeing a man cry. Do you enjoy cradling a man as he cries into your bosom? No, the men tend to be the ones who support the women as they cry.
M.
M, Does anyone really enjoy seeing anyone cry?? What a bizarre concept. I am sympathetic to anyone crying, and not more or less distressed by gender or situation.
Go ahead and cry, for godsake!
Sister Wolf,
I will only cry in front of you after I have been gang raped in a Marines Baracks, Ok?
You however are free to cry in front of me whenever you like, and I will be more than happy to comfort you as much as you need/desire.
M.
Insightful post, Clio, especially the end part about how male homosexuality could actually help with a warrior ethic (shades of the Spartans, right?). That shows a real ability to imagine your way past modern stereotypes about homosexuality. British imperialism required long periods away from home and family in a homosocial environment.
First off, as Lee Harris in "Civilization and It's Enemies" makes clear, the system of Sparta was put in place, deliberately, to prevent dynastic control. Considering that the Spartans could boast that for 700 years, unlike all other cities, they were neither ruled by invaders or their own despots, that was not an inconsiderable achievement in a time with fairly static military technology, where manpower advantage usually counted.
Second, Byron is a poor example, his contemporary Shelley, and wife Mary (who married him at age 17 after getting pregnant with him at 16) would be a much better example. Even better, Johnson. If you've read Boswell's "Life of Johnson" which is, of course, heavy going, you'll see that Johnson's somewhat limited schooling is more typical -- a catch as catch can approach rather than the more formal public schools spreading out beyond the upper aristocracy in the 19th Century.
I detect more than a hint of the usual feminine PC-bs here, since women in Europe and particularly England had more rights and freedom of person than in any other contemporary society. Bernard Lewis in the "Muslim Discovery of Europe" cites contemporary accounts by Muslim ambassadors to the Court at Vienna, appalled that the Emperor himself would stop in the street to let ladies pass, and even worse, doff his hat to them!
It's pretty clear that the nuclear family, spreading marriage and sons and daughters (which itself btw led to improvement in women's position -- a man might only have daughters so wish to provide for their betterment) to ordinary people, was the main source of Europe's competitive advantage over it's rivals.
Men's attitudes towards women, when it's winner take all, as in Muslim lands, dominated by Polygamy, tend to be fairly hostile, while men become fairly effeminate and brutal towards each other, betrayal as a way of life. No "honor" and a "man's word is his bond" because there is no expectation of security. Albania was and is today of course, quite Muslim.
At the other end of the spectrum, women first gained the right to vote in New Zealand and Wyoming, in 1869, because male settlers there wanted wives and sought to attract them, on a fair playing field, by offering better treatment and more rights.
J**** Murphy, Whiskey, what feminine PC? Are you trying to suggest that anyone seeking an explanation for the peculiar arrangements that prevailed at English public schools is of necessity "PC"?
I know very well that the great public schools were not like ordinary schools; they weren't intended to be. They were intended to produce a caste of leaders. And yes, they were; if you looked at the way they advertised themselves (then or now) that concept would come up over and over again. What I was speculating about was - why did the schools allow such brutal treatment of the boys by the other boys? I think my answer was at least plausible, though as it's purely speculative, it could be wrong.
I never intended to imply that it was better to be a woman in the Muslim world (or wherever) than to be a woman in England. I did say that there was one odd point of similarity between the masculine society Byron found in Muslim Albania, and the kind he experienced at Harrow.
I also don't understand what you mean in saying "Byron is a poor example." Poor example of what, exactly? Of the experience of the English ruling classes? If that's what you meant, he's a better one than Shelley, who was a rebel through and through, as Byron was not. He was also several degrees of social rank above Shelley, a peer and not merely a squire's son.
Everyone should stop chattering non-stop about fathers, and remove the mental block that prevents mention of the mother.
Cause there ain't nothing greater than a mother's love. Blah, blah.
Mommy is the one taking care of the little brat, and Daddy is the one paying for the abuse. So which is benefiting from sending the brat away?
We were speaking of the early to mid-19th century, when it was seldom mother who had the last word over how and where their sons were educated. In any case, above a certain social level, they weren't supposed to do much of the grunt-work in child-care on their own; they had servants for that. So your assumptions are false, wb.
Clio
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